A dolphin swims in the Wilmington River on Saturday. For twenty years The Dolphin Project has sought to understand the health and travels of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins around the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. Hunter McRae/Savannah Morning News

Dolphins swim in the Wilmington River on Saturday. For 20 years, The Dolphin Project has sought to understand the health and travels of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins around the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. Hunter McRae/Savannah Morning News

A dolphin swims in the Wilmington River on Saturday. For 20 years, The Dolphin Project has sought to understand the health and travels of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins around the Georgia and South Carolina coasts. Hunter McRae/Savannah Morning News

Hill started with the project in its first year after reading about it in the paper.

"I thought it was a neat idea," he said. "At the time, there was an epidemic up north of red tide that was killing dolphins. Beau (Cutts) thought somebody should do a study in the Southeast."

When the project began, everyone involved believed that dolphins migrated, Hill said. That turned out to be inaccurate.

An early finding of the research showed that most of dolphins never get spotted more than 10 miles from their initial sighting point, said Cutts, the project's founder and first president.

The Dolphin Project is a nonprofit organization that relies entirely on trained volunteers. To date, 4,500 people have participated.

The volunteers spend one weekend a month from January through November photographing the dolphins.

Over the past 20 years, about 850 individual dolphins have been identified in about 600,000 photographs, Cutts said.

A dolphin can be identified by unique indentations on the trailing edge of its dorsal fin, according to a news release from The Dolphin Project.

Photographing the dolphins can be challenging to new volunteers, Hill said.

"The key is to keep your eyes on the direction they are heading," he noted. "You can usually catch them about 50 yards ahead."

The volunteers cruise the water at 8 to 10 knots, constantly moving so they can observe the dolphins as naturally as possible.

"When they see them, they don't slow down for them," Hill said. "They don't want to upset them."

On Saturday, however, Hill stopped to watch a group of about seven dolphins just east of Priest Landing Marina on the Wilmington River.

"They're all over down here," he said, pointing out three dolphins about 50 yards to the right of the boat.

So far, the research has not been fully studied, Hill said.

"A lot of the stuff they've documented hasn't really been processed," he said. "Now they're gathering all the information that's been assembled over the 20 years."

That task was given to Tara Cox, an assistant professor of marine science at Savannah State University.

"You have to be able to document this stuff," Hill said. "When they put the research together, they'll be able to say, 'This is more than likely what they're feeding on, and this is what they do.' "

TO Get involved

The Dolphin Project needs skippers with their own boats, photographers with their own digital single-lens reflex cameras with at least a 300 mm lens and people to train to be team leaders. Training is free, available in Savannah and Atlanta. The next training session is set to start at 9 a.m. Sept. 5. For more information, go to www.thedolphinproject.org.